Knowledge and the communication of knowledge are critical for self-sustaining organizations comprised of people and the tools and machines that extend peoples’ physical and cognitive capacities. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela proposed the concept of autopoiesis (“self” + “production”) as a definition of life in the 1970s. Niklas Luhmann extended this concept to establish a theory of social systems, where intangible human social systems were formed by recursive networks of communications. We show here that Luhmann fundamentally misunderstood Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis by thinking that the self-observation necessary for self-maintenance formed a paradoxically vicious circle. Luhmann tried to resolve this apparent paradox by placing the communication networks on an imaginary plane orthogonal to the networked people. However, Karl Popper’s evolutionary epistemology and the theory of hierarchically complex systems turn what Luhmann thought was a vicious circle into a virtuous spiral of organizational learning and knowledge. There is no closed circle that needs to be explained via Luhmann’s extraordinarily paradoxical linguistic contortions. Relevance: This paper criticises Luhmann’s concept of social systems based in recursive networks of communications and shows that an evolutionary constructivist unification of Maturana and Varela’s version of autopoiesis and Popperian (1972 and later) evolutionary epistemology provides a non-paradoxical understanding of the emergence of knowledge-based social systems.

Urban areas are administratively complex, and bureaucrats are often overburdened when they are working at or beyond what Herbert Simon called the bounds of their rationality. Decisions impacting community group members may be based on little genuine knowledge of issues. Groups concerned with particular issues may emerge in the community. Given their focus and interests, group members will collect and construct issue-related knowledge that can be assembled into proposals. However, it is often difficult for people to form such networks and discover what their various interested members know to construct the collective knowledge. Also, such community knowledge is often ignored by governing bodies and their bureaucracies. This chapter reviews this situation from deep theoretical, technological and practical points of view and shows how simple to use and freely available social networking tools in the cloud can be applied to effectively support knowledge based community action. Relevance: The theoretical framework for the paper begins with the sociological concept of “community action” in a complex systems hierarchy and considers the autopoietic construction of knowledge within emergent knowledge-based action groups. A Popperian evolutionary/constructivist epistemology is followed.